The reveal of X-Men ’97 Bastion shows that the greatest threat to humanity is AI

Since only the three-part final flash remains, X Men ’97 has revealed its big villain, and he’s the same as her old one.

This is not a criticism! It’s right in line with the biggest theme in X-Men history that most adaptations don’t want to touch on – that mutants are just representation one Option for the future of humanity. There are other children of humanity’s hubris, they want their day in the sun and they are willing to kill mutants And people to get it.

[Ed. note: This piece contains spoilers for X-Men ’97 episode 7, “Bright Eyes.”]

Image: Marvel Studios Animation

In “Bright Eyes,” the X-Men search for the mastermind behind the Kaiju Sentinel massacre in Genosha. The pursuit leads to Mutant Enemies #1 and #2: Henry Peter Gyrich, a government agent since (apparently) murdering Professor X; and Bolivar Trask, the creator of the Sentinel robots.

We see a shadowy figure smothering Gyrich so that he cannot reveal any more secrets. And when the Trask undergoes a strange transformation and appears poised to defeat all of the X-Men single-handedly, until Cable shows up to help and deliver a warning: Gyrich, Trask, and even Mister Sinister are working for someone even more fearsome.

The final moments of the episode reveal that this person is this shadowy figure and even give him a name: Bastion.

Who is Bastion?

Bastion has been on the X-Men villain block a few times, but he is best known as the villain from the 1997 story arc Operation: Zero tolerance – hence the acronym in “Bright Eyes” and the title of X Men ’97The three-part final arc of “Tolerance Is Extinction” is called “Tolerance Is Extinction.”

In a time when anti-mutant sentiment was at an all-time high (the X-Men had to kill the Avengers and Fantastic Four to save the world; they actually survived, don’t worry), a mysterious guy named Sebastian Gilberti convinced the US government to support his plan to eradicate mutants.

This plan was to create the Prime Sentinels, which look like Sentinels were human sleeper agents. “Bastion” developed nanotechnology that could be implanted into unsuspecting humans, turning them into powerful, tricked cyborgs at his will and placing their actions under his control – exactly what appears to have happened to Bolivar Trask in “Bright Eyes.”

But Bastion wasn’t the normal (albeit hateful) human guy he seemed to be, and “Bright Eyes” has some hints of that too. He refers to Mister Sinister as an “old villain” who has failed to kill the X-Men for years, and Sinister immediately replies that Bastion was “once one of those villains.”

“But unlike the rest of you, I have evolved,” Bastion replies.

In the comics, it was eventually revealed that Bastion had his own cyborg secret that even he didn’t know about – he was and always has been an offshoot of the most powerful Sentinel to ever exist, Nimrod.

Who the hell is Nimrod?

Jonathan Hickman, RB Silva/Marvel Comics

Nimrod is the Skynet of the X-Men stories, a mutant-hunting artificial intelligence from the future. In the Marvel Comics canon, every Sentinel production eventually leads to the creation of a Nimrod in every timeline. And in each timeline, Nimrod and his cohort of mutant-hunting machines eventually decide that mutants are not their only enemies and turn against the rest of the human species as well.

(In defense of Nimrod’s creators, Chris Claremont and John Romita Jr., it was invented in 1984, when “Nimrod” only existed only over is increasingly known as a common insult in American slang rather than a reference to the biblical hunter.)

Nimrod appeared in X-Men: The Animated Series, largely as a threat in a possible future, or as someone who has traveled through time to the present. In the 1992-1997 era, there just weren’t many Nimrod stories to choose from.

The idea of ​​the Big Purple has dispensed with robots as a constant X-Men threat. No Sentinels, no Nimrod, no three-way war between humans, mutants and AI.

Sentinels are much more than just lumbering purple robots

It’s pertinent to point out that Bolivar Trask, the Sentinels, and the sentient sentinel factory Master Mold were introduced in 1965, right in the B-movie era of the atomic age.

In contrast, Nimrod was created this year The Terminator came out. As technology and our concerns about technology have evolved, so has the way the X-Men creators view Sentinels. In the late 1990s, personal computers and casual access to the Internet led to more and more technology being integrated into everyday life. The actual potential computer apocalypse, Y2K, has been widely reported! It’s no wonder that Nimrod and the idea of ​​rogue technology were brought back into the foundation of the X-Men.

X-Men stories, as always, are about the conflict between humanity and the idea that our mutant children are the natural future of the species. But there’s a steady drumbeat quietly sounding in the background, warning that humanity is not careful how it creates its own things technological Children – if it not only teaches children to hate, but explicitly creates beings for that purpose – it will bring about its own destruction.

It’s the kind of story that X-Men: The Animated Series I couldn’t have said it in 1997, which is exactly why it’s so exciting X Men ’97 takes up the torch.